[Petal] Petal performance

[Mark Holland]

Hi JM,

Quite some time ago, you wrote:

> Speaking about competition, it is an area in which the Template Toolkit
> is really good because its stash engine has been entirely rewritten in
> XS.

> Mind you, with a bit of work it should be possible to get Petal to use
> Template Toolkit's XS engine if it's available... should I consider
> doing that as the next item on my TODO list?	

I've been trying to track down some bottlenecks in a site i'm developing. 
Running things through Dprof shows Petal taking well over 70% of all
processing time. I've got all caching turned on but it doesn't seem to 
help that much.

The area where I've really come across a performance hit is with recursive 
Xincludes. Processing even a midly complex tree structure really begins to 
take ages.

How much work would it be to get Petal to use an XS engine? Would the
performance gain be much? If you think it's worth it, then please can I 
put it on your TODO list? ;)

Cheers,
Mark

ps. On a side note, a few weeks ago I asked about using cursors in Petal. 
Well, your suggestion of using a tied array worked beautifully - thanks :)
At some point I'll try and knock up a quick howto and put it on the Petal
website.